Highlights

  • No Return in The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered offers an action-packed roguelike experience with randomized modifiers and enemy factions.
  • Players need to strategize and adapt their tactics for each encounter, considering score multipliers and enemy types, to aim for S-ranks and high scores.
  • The Walking Dead's combat technique of shooting an enemy's leg and rushing in for a melee kill is highly effective in No Return, contributing to stuns and melee kills for higher scores.

The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered celebrates Naughty Dog’s brutal combat in the most tense way via No Return. Usually, The Last of Us does a superb job of varying gameplay from moment to moment between slow story beats, stealth, and combat, but No Return abandons the former for an action-packed roguelike experience from the start of a run to its end, whether players succeed in defeating their run’s boss or fail anywhere after beginning their first encounter.

Therefore, certain tactics work well when adapted from muscle memory and others don’t. The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered’s ordinary story campaign has many tense encounters of its own, but never in a gauntlet onslaught of randomized modifiers and enemy factions. Then, if players are attempting to be competitive against themselves or others, there are score multipliers to consider when strategizing in any encounter. This is where one of the most simple and iconic combat techniques from Telltale’s The Walking Dead comes into play beautifully.

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The Last of Us’ No Return Roguelike Can Learn a Lot from Telltale’s The Walking Dead

Scores are Important for Competitive No Return Runs in The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered

S-ranks are difficult to come by unless players are masterfully assessing how each enemy should be taken out, and that’s never more true than on higher difficulties like Grounded. It’s easy to see how a run can be tarnished immediately if players are locked into a path with some of No Return’s more tedious encounter modes—Assault and Capture are arguably more relaxed while Hunted and Holdout are far more demanding, but it all comes down to what enemy faction and modifiers are active.

Players never need to worry about a herd of clickers being invisible or Molotovs raining from the sky in the story campaign, for instance, and yet those are legitimate threats in No Return. That’s all without even addressing optional Gambits, which are typically challenging to execute while scrambling around, particularly when one tasks players with feeding a Rattler to a clicker.

How players want to maneuver through an encounter is also predetermined by what character they have chosen because that means they’re stuck with a specific build and play style, though resources earned can contribute to other weapons and skills unlocked between runs. If enemies begin in search mode that’ll often make the beginning of an encounter more lenient, too, but thankfully there’s a tried-and-true strategy to employ that The Walking Dead’s Clementine is a seasoned veteran of, and as an added bonus it contributes to multiple score multipliers in No Return.

Telltale’s The Walking Dead Offers a Vital Lesson in Combat

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As long as players have a short gun on hand and can take enemies on one by one, players will find the tactic of shooting an enemy’s leg and rushing in to get a quick melee kill incredibly effective. In The Walking Dead, this technique is popular because it prevents a walker from getting in close and allows characters to get in close to execute them with a melee weapon, thus preserving precious ammunition.

The same is true of The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered , though enemies are much faster and require better accuracy to knee-cap them before they close the distance.

If players can master this strategy they’ll be treated to a greater score since the entire sequence of actions contributes to stuns and melee kills as well; sometimes it isn’t worth it to go strictly for headshots, and again many different elements can incentivize a different play style on any encounter. Either way, it’s amusing to see The Walking Dead’s iconic strategy work so advantageously in The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered’s No Return roguelike mode.